Food, Wine, Travel

Queensbridge Square

If you’ve been anywhere near Queensbridge Square on the Yarra River this week you would have seen a hive of activity as the Greenhouse by Joost was built for this year’s Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.

Today it is open, and is a magnificent homage to sustainability in its entirety.

From the building materials used, to the food sourcing and production, to its furniture design, it is a lesson in green awesomeness. And the coffee is ACE.

Chef Matt Stone (from the Greenhouse in Perth) will be cooking up a green storm, with a breakfast, lunch and dinner menu using only fresh local ingredients, so local the wheat is being milled on site, and the yoghurt and butter is made from organic milk and cream delivered daily.

There is a gorgeous rooftop garden and bar overlooking the river, full of plants for the kitchen, and herbs line the exterior walls in terracotta pots in a vertical garden. The electricity comes from unrefined canola oil, the walls are formaldehyde-free plywood and the glue is made entirely from soybeans. This place is so sustainable they’re even harvesting human urine to use as crop fertilizer for a farm in Daylesford. I’m probably a little more interested in this than I should be – if you are similarly fascinated, you can read more about this in detail here.

Joost Bakker is the visionary architect of the Greenhouse space, having created the original back in 2008 in Federation Square in Melbourne, and then creating the whole restaurant in Perth.

He is quite simply my HERO, and I’ve never been so proud to be Dutch!!

As anyone who knows me can tell you, my 2 biggest passions are food and sustainability so this has me jumping out of my skin with excitement, much like I did when I first visited the Greenhouse in Perth last year.

The calendar of events for the Greenhouse over the coming weeks is nothing short of senstational, naturally the dinner with great Dane Rene Redzepi is sold out, however there is a veritable smorgasbord of other options to whet your appetite.

I’m booked in for lunch with Rosa Mitchell, for some homestyle Italian cooking on March 14th.